Tina Brown for The Daily Beast: Tina Brown: New World Order

Associated Speakers

Ripples of mirth greet David Henry Hwang’s canny, hilarious Broadway hit Chinglish. It’s rather more chilling to read news accounts of a strangely parallel narrative of intrigue and corruption running now in China, a murder case in which an important Chinese politician’s wife is being investigated in the poisoning of a shadowy British businessman. Hwang’s play features a naive American businessman who arrives in a province of the new, ruthlessly acquisitive China, looking for a lucrative contract for his family’s sign-making firm. He gets embroiled with a party official’s clinically seductive wife and finds himself arrested on corruption charges that are a pretext for a power struggle.

One of Hwang’s themes is the Chinese “fixer’s” slyly garbled translation of the hapless salesman’s attempts to make a deal. “We’re a small, family firm,” for instance, gets relayed as “His company is small and insignificant.” Hwang has said he first got the idea of mistranslation as a jumping-off point about doing business in China after a visit to a brand-new cultural center in Shanghai, where the handicapped restroom was labeled “Deformed Man’s Toilet.” It seems he’s become fascinated by the changes he’s witnessed in China since writing M. Butterfly 24 years ago. That play, he writes in Newsweek, was conceived at a time when a European man involved with a Chinese woman could still indulge himself with the stereotypical fantasy of the dominant Western male and the fluttering Asian dolly. In Chinglish, two decades later, he shows us that power relationships have shifted, as they have in real-life China. There, British businessman Neil Heywood seems to have been used by the ambitious Madame Gu Kailai, then apparently disposed of without an autopsy—an unsettling whiff of the new world order, as well, perhaps, of sexual ruthlessness.